Vic Bubas

In the steel towns north of Indianapolis, basketball was the second job. Gary, Indiana in the 1930s and '40s was where the Big Steel furnaces ran twenty-four hours a day and the high-school gyms ran nearly as long. Victor Albert Bubas — born January 28, 1927 to immigrant parents — grew up there, on streets where his future Lew Wallace High School classmates included a kid named Hank Stram who would one day win Super Bowl IV as the head coach of the Kansas City Chiefs. Lew Wallace itself was named for the Civil War general who wrote Ben-Hur. Bubas graduated in 1944, the world still at war, and crossed the state line for one semester of basketball at the University of Illinois before being called for military service.

When he came back to college, the Indiana kid did something almost no Indiana kid did. He went south. North Carolina State had hired a transplanted Hoosier named Everett Case, who two years earlier had won four straight Indiana state high school championships at Frankfort. Case was assembling what Tobacco Road would come to call his "Hoosier Hotshots" — Indiana boys he trusted to play the up-tempo style he'd brought down from the prairie. Bubas was one of them. He played four seasons in Raleigh from 1947 to 1951, won four straight Southern Conference championships, was a two-time All-Southern Conference selection, and reached the 1950 NCAA Final Four as a senior. He was not the team's leading scorer. He was a defense-oriented playmaker — a smart guard who saw the floor a step ahead of the people on it. "Coach on the floor" was the phrase his teammates used.

Case had told Bubas during his recruitment that he would teach him how to coach. He delivered. After graduation Bubas stayed on as State's freshman coach (1951–55) and then as Case's top varsity assistant (1955–59). Inside the Raleigh program he watched, up close, the man who was modernizing southern college basketball. Case ran fast breaks when no one else did. Case used pep bands and ladder cuttings and ribbon presentations to make games into events. Case scouted opponents with a thoroughness no one else bothered with. And Case won, season after season, until the rival Tobacco Road schools — Duke, UNC, Wake Forest — had no choice but to come for him. Frank McGuire was poached from St. John's to fix UNC. Duke went a different direction. They went after Case's lieutenant.

Bubas had been restless. He was 32, the heir apparent at NC State, but his mentor wasn't going anywhere. He had applied for the Ohio State job and lost it to Fred Taylor. He had applied for a few others. A pattern of near-misses had begun to settle. By the spring of 1959 he was considering leaving coaching entirely. The Duke call came at exactly the right moment. Eddie Cameron — the longtime Duke basketball coach turned athletic director, the man whose name was about to go on the building — was looking to replace Harold Bradley, who had left for Texas. Cameron later said he had more than a hundred applicants. He went with the 32-year-old assistant from across the highway, a man who had never been a head coach a day in his life. Bubas was named Duke's head coach on May 5, 1959. Twelve hours later he was on a plane to New York.

The plane was for Art Heyman. The 6-foot-5 forward from Rockville Centre, Long Island was the most coveted high school prospect in the country, and he had verbally committed to Frank McGuire's North Carolina program weeks earlier. McGuire had publicly announced the commitment. The recruiting battle, by every measure of how recruiting battles worked in 1959, was over. Then Heyman's stepfather and McGuire got into a screaming argument at the Carolina Inn in Chapel Hill. The stepfather had called UNC "a basketball factory." McGuire had not appreciated the term. As Heyman later told Durham sportswriter Al Featherston: "I had to step in between them. My stepfather called Carolina a basketball factory, and McGuire didn't like that. They were about to start swinging at each other."

The morning of May 7, 1959 — the day after he was hired — Bubas sat in the Playbill Restaurant of New York's Manhattan Hotel and spent his first day on the job flipping the country's number one recruit. He didn't promise Heyman anything. He charmed his mother and stepfather. "Bubas charmed my mother and stepfather," Heyman would later say. "They made me go to Duke. All my friends from New York were in Carolina. If Duke hadn't picked me up at the airport, I would have gone down the road and started school there." Five days into his job as a head coach, Vic Bubas had taken the best player in the country away from the program eight miles down Tobacco Road, and the Duke-UNC rivalry as we know it today had been born.

That was the template. Over the next decade Bubas would do this again and again, with a methodical organization that simply hadn't existed in college basketball recruiting before. He targeted players as high school juniors — in an era when most coaches didn't start until senior fall. He sent prospects weekly newspaper clippings of Duke games. He kept index cards on every player on his board, with notes from his assistants, his alumni contacts, and his own visits. He built a national pipeline at a time when most ACC recruiting still stopped at the Virginia state line. Lexington, Kentucky native and future two-time All-American Jeff Mullins came to Duke from under Adolph Rupp's nose at Kentucky. Bob Verga came down from New Jersey, Jay Buckley from Maryland, Jack Marin from Pennsylvania, Steve Vacendak from Pennsylvania, Mike Lewis from Missoula, Montana. After Bubas spent an afternoon alone with Mike Lewis's father in Missoula, the father turned to his son and said, "You need to go play for Coach Bubas."

Dean Smith, who would arrive in Chapel Hill in 1961 and eventually become one of the greatest coaches in college basketball history, later acknowledged what everyone in the league already knew. "Vic taught us all how to recruit," Smith said. "We had been starting on prospects in the fall of their senior year. For a while all of us were trying to catch up with him."

The on-court results came almost immediately. The 1959-60 Blue Devils, Bubas's first team and still mostly Bradley's holdovers, finished 7-7 in the ACC and were blown out twice each by Wake Forest and UNC during the regular season. Then they walked into the ACC Tournament, beat South Carolina, stunned 16th-ranked North Carolina in the semifinal, and stunned 18th-ranked Wake Forest in the championship game. Duke's first ACC Tournament title. They advanced to the NCAA Eastern Regional Final before losing to NYU. Bubas had been Duke head coach for ten months and had already done what no Duke head coach had done before.

Heyman arrived for varsity play in 1960-61 (freshmen were ineligible). What followed was the most sustained run of national success in pre-K Duke history. From 1961 to 1967 Duke had the highest winning percentage of any team in the country. Duke finished first in the ACC regular season four years in a row from 1963 to 1966. The Blue Devils made eight ACC Tournament championship games in Bubas's ten seasons and won four (1960, 1963, 1964, 1966). They reached the AP Top 10 in seven of those ten seasons.

And they made three Final Fours. 1963: Heyman, the AP National Player of the Year, leads Duke past NYU and Saint Joseph's into Duke's first Final Four ever. Loyola Chicago, the eventual national champion, runs them out of Freedom Hall. 1964: Mullins becomes the ACC Player of the Year and Duke goes all the way to the NCAA Championship Game, where they lose to John Wooden's first national title team at UCLA — Wooden's first of ten. 1966: Marin and Verga become Duke's first pair of consensus All-Americans in the same season, Duke beats two-time-defending-champion UCLA twice during the regular season, and after the second UCLA win Duke ascends to the No. 1 spot in the AP poll for the first time in school history. Vacendak wins ACC Tournament MVP. The Final Four is in Cole Field House in College Park, Maryland. In the semifinal, Verga is wrecked by a strep throat infection. Duke loses to Adolph Rupp's all-white Kentucky team by seven, and Kentucky goes on to lose the championship game to Don Haskins's Texas Western team — the team that started five Black players and won the title that changed the sport. Bubas later said, every chance he got, that the 1966 team was his best, and that with a healthy Verga, Duke would have won it all.

Bubas's offense averaged 92.4 points per game in 1965, a Duke single-season record that still stands today. He brought a pep band into the Indoor Stadium for the first time. He added player names to the back of jerseys. He introduced dancing girls at halftime. He hosted a weekly TV show. He started a summer basketball camp on Duke's campus that became a model for the entire industry. As Bucky Waters — Bubas's longtime assistant and eventual successor — once put it: "He wasn't much older than us. But it seemed like he was. We all knew he was going to be a head coach."

The other thing Bubas did, with the unglamorous understatement that characterized most of what he did, was preside over the integration of Duke basketball. In the spring of 1965, an 18-year-old engineering student from Danville, Virginia named Claudius "C.B." Claiborne arrived at Duke on a National Achievement Scholarship — an academic scholarship, not a basketball one. He had been ranked No. 1 in his Langston High School class. He had been selected as one of the inaugural Presidential Scholars and invited to the White House. Duke alumnus Wallace Newman in Danville saw him play and called Duke assistant Chuck Daly. Daly drove up to Danville, watched Claiborne for about sixty seconds, and said, "He could be our sixth man." When the local paper announced Claiborne would be enrolling at Duke, Bubas's quote to UPI was carefully neutral: Claiborne would be "welcome to come out for the team and compete for a position." Should he make the grade, Claiborne would be Duke's first Black varsity basketball player. He did make the grade. He played from 1966 to 1969, joined the Allen Building Takeover in February 1969 (the Black student protest that helped create Duke's African and African American Studies department), and graduated in 1969 as one of only nine African American students in Duke's history to that point. Bubas did not lead the charge into a new era — Duke continued to hold its annual basketball banquet at a segregated country club where Claiborne was excluded — but the Bubas program made room for him when much of the South would not, and Bubas signed Don Blackman, his first actively-recruited Black player, in 1968.

The other other thing Bubas built was a coaching tree. He surrounded himself with assistants the way he surrounded himself with everything else — with people one notch better than the situation required. Bucky Waters succeeded him as Duke head coach. Fred Shabel became head coach at UConn. Tom Carmody became head coach at Rhode Island. Hubie Brown — yes, that Hubie Brown — became an ABA and NBA head coach who would win NBA Coach of the Year twice and ultimately be inducted into the Naismith Hall of Fame. Chuck Daly — yes, that Chuck Daly — would coach the Detroit Pistons' Bad Boys to back-to-back NBA championships in 1989 and 1990, coach the 1992 Olympic Dream Team to gold in Barcelona, and enter the Hall of Fame himself. The Bubas coaching tree at Duke produced two NBA Hall of Fame head coaches before Coach K had even been hired.

Vic Bubas was 42 years old when he walked off the floor for the last time on March 8, 1969. He had a 213-67 record at Duke. His .761 winning percentage in those ten seasons remains the second-highest of any Duke coach in the modern era — behind only Krzyzewski. He could have coached almost anywhere. He chose, instead, to retire from coaching entirely, and he chose it at an age when most coaches are just hitting their stride.

He didn't leave Duke. He moved across the quad. From 1969 to 1976 he served as a Duke administrator, eventually rising to Vice President of Community Relations — a role that put him in charge of the university's external engagement with Durham and the Triangle. He stayed visible in college basketball, but as a builder of structure rather than a coach of players. And then in 1976 he answered one last call.

On October 6, 1976, the new Sun Belt Conference — formed from a merger of independents and Southern Conference defectors — named him its first commissioner. He held the job for fourteen years, until his retirement in 1990. Under his leadership the Sun Belt grew from six members to nine, expanded its sport sponsorship from four to ten, and established itself as one of the strongest mid-major conferences in the country. The conference's annual all-sports championship trophy is named for him: the Vic Bubas Cup.

The other thing he did in his Sun Belt years — quietly, with the same unglamorous administrative competence he'd brought to recruiting twenty years earlier — was reshape March itself. The NCAA appointed him to its Division I Basketball Committee in 1979 for a six-year term. The committee at that time was the body that decided how the NCAA Tournament was structured, who got bids, and how big the field would be. Bubas served as chair of the committee for the 1984-85 season — the year the NCAA Tournament expanded from 53 teams to 64. That bracket structure, the one we have called "the bracket" ever since, the one that drives forty billion dollars of office-pool conversation every March, the one that makes Cinderella possible — that was the bracket Bubas helped finalize. The committee under his chairmanship also moved the Final Four into domed stadiums, creating the format that lets 70,000 fans watch a national championship game in person.

He was inducted into the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame in 1975. The Duke Athletics Hall of Fame in 1977. The Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame in 2002. The National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame in 2007. The Gary Sports Hall of Fame in 2023, posthumously. He never won a national championship as a head coach. He shaped the tournament that crowns one.

Vic Bubas died on the morning of April 16, 2018, at his home in Midlothian, Virginia, just outside Richmond. He was 91 years old. He had celebrated his 91st birthday three months earlier at a hotel in Durham, surrounded by about eighty people — old players, old assistants, his wife Tootie, his daughters. Two weeks before his death, Bucky Waters and Steve Vacendak — the assistant who succeeded him and the captain of his 1966 team — had driven up from Durham to have lunch with him and present him with a framed photograph from the birthday party. "It was good, really good, for us that we were able to see him just a couple of weeks ago," Vacendak said afterward, "and present him with a lot of memories in that photograph." He is buried in Richmond.

When the news of his death broke that April morning, the man who had built Duke basketball into what it is now released a statement. "Duke basketball lost a true legend earlier today," Mike Krzyzewski said. "When I first arrived at Duke, Coach Bubas gave me the best advice. Essentially, he told me to be myself and to focus solely on Duke, while not getting caught up in everything going on around us. We have tried to honor him over the years by playing a level of basketball that lived up to his very high standards, and to those of the program he built here in the 1960s."

That last phrase is the one to sit with. The program he built here in the 1960s. Coach K — five national championships, thirteen Final Fours, the most wins in Division I men's basketball history — did not say he built Duke basketball. He said Vic Bubas did, and that the work he and Jon Scheyer and everyone in between has done since has been an attempt to honor those standards.

Steve Vacendak put it more plainly. "Coach Bubas is a man who established the foundation and the culture that is Duke basketball," Vacendak said the day Bubas died. "He's responsible for what Duke basketball has become. I think that's quite an achievement, and sometimes people lose perspective about it."

He coached his last game in March 1969, more than half a century before this profile was written. By the time he died, the Indoor Stadium where he won his Final Fours had been named after Eddie Cameron for forty-six years. The recruiting innovations he pioneered were taken for granted everywhere. The 64-team bracket he helped finalize had been the bracket for thirty-three years. The conference he founded had grown from a four-sport mid-major to a fourteen-school, twenty-sport league. His coaching tree had won three NBA championships and an Olympic gold medal. His own Duke teams' .761 winning percentage was still better than every Duke coach in history except the one Eddie Cameron's successors had eventually hired to follow him.

The late sportscaster Bill Currie, the most colorful broadcaster of the early ACC, once told a reporter the single best line ever written about him. "Vic Bubas," Currie said, "is a man with a lot of brains." It is a simple sentence. It is also a true sentence. Before there was K, there was Vic. And before there was Vic, there was nothing — at least nothing nationally — that anyone outside the eight miles between Durham and Chapel Hill called Duke basketball.